Enhanced License Plate Tracking

The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data:

A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.

Yes, it’s bad that more companies are collecting this level of surveillance data. But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.

Alternate link.

Tags: cars, sensors, surveillance, tracking

Posted on June 11, 2026 at 7:01 AM • 24 Comments

Comments

Not really anonymous • June 11, 2026 7:28 AM

I think it is past time to get rid of license plates. The bargain has been altered and they now cause more trouble than they are worth.
How do the link the correct cell phones with the car? It seems like that data will be fuzzy, especially for those of us that don’t carry cell phones with us.

TimH • June 11, 2026 7:31 AM

Another reason to turn off BT and wifi on a phone when leaving the house. USB connected Carplay can provide the handsfree functions.

Wannabe Techguy • June 11, 2026 9:58 AM

@ Not really anonymous:
Could you clarify what “bargain” you are referring to?

Rontea • June 11, 2026 10:09 AM

SignalTrace looks like another step in fusing disparate data sources into a persistent tracking capability. Linking Bluetooth and Wi-Fi identifiers to ALPR hits isn’t just about vehicles—it’s about building a behavioral map of people over time. This is the kind of capability that quickly blurs the line between traffic enforcement and full-spectrum surveillance. If deployed widely, strict policy, oversight, and audit mechanisms are going to be critical. Otherwise, you end up with a system that can quietly follow anyone, anywhere, by the devices they carry.

KC • June 11, 2026 11:17 AM

Leonardo appears to be marketing SignalTrace, here to retailers, to combat organized retail crime.
https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/blog/the-rise-in-retail-crime-and-how-leonardos-plate-recognition-technologies-can-help

From Joseph Cox, the product sheet:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/28215440-signaltrace-us/

Possessing and accessing all that correlation data will surely draw scrutiny. It’s almost amazing it’s legal now.

Not really anonymous • June 11, 2026 11:39 AM

Having license plates on a car is a trade off that helps law enforcement administer some things easier than if they say had to read the VIN off the dashboard or ask the driver for registration documents versus the privacy of the users.
When law enforcement was only recording license plate numbers when the stopped cars or issued parking citations and other parties relied on memory this didn’t have much affect on people (with some exceptions around abortion clinics and houses of ill repute).
Nowadays goverments are trying to track all movement and recording license plate data just because they can. While that could in theory be limited, keeping other parties from doing it is essentially isn’t practical (a very hard to enforce law). Without easily visible license plates it would be much harder for others parties (e.g. Flock) to connect cars to people.

DBA • June 11, 2026 12:04 PM

@TimH:
Turning off BT isn’t feasible for me as I’m very hard of hearing and wear hearing aids. Working in a library, I need the alerts fed to me so my phone can remain truly silent.

It sucks, but I don’t have much of a choice.

Jordan Brown • June 11, 2026 12:17 PM

If you leave the cellular radio on, that’s another source of information. And if you turn the cellular radio off, your CarPlay isn’t going to work very well.

John Pritchard • June 11, 2026 12:58 PM

The myriad sousveillance phenomena from government and industry need to be far more conscious, generally. Awareness walking into cognizance. The issues of human rights elevated from obscurity to relevance of person and property in politics and law.

lurker • June 11, 2026 2:11 PM

Google started this, and many others have folowed with OAuth letting you
“stay logged in on this trusted device.” And yes, there are many flaws in that assumption, but the result was:

The device became a proxy for the person.

A possible workaround might be to have different devices at home, work, wherever, and for different routes between them; randomly shuffle the devices. The number of devices required for mild obscurity would be far beyond the capacity of most normal people.

Our addiction to these devices has come to bite us. They have come to be an identity badge, and going about in public without one may soon become a crime.

Clive Robinson • June 11, 2026 3:38 PM

@ Bruce, ALL

With regards,

“But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.”

Does it? In one respect you have “choice” in that you don’t need to carry “smartphones” around.

If you look back you will find I’ve been warning about this hoovering up of IDing numbers for many years especially those you have little choice in carrying like the increasingly common “Medical Implants” such as pacemakers and all those “RF id tags”(RFids) put into goods like your clothing etc for “stock control” and similar. Where the device requires no internal or directly connected power source, and will functionally last as long if not longer than the item it’s in…

Mostly my voiced concern so people could understand was RFiDs in clothing and similar everyday carry with you items.

As I’ve pointed out, whilst each RFid would not technically identify you as little as two or three would, and enable other identifiers to get attached to you so build up a profile, not just of the numbers but back tracing then to types of item thus gather behavioural information. Think “walking boots”, other “sports clothing”, “lingerie”, “formal shirts”, “business suit” etc.

The problem is unlike a phone or other device “leaving them at home” can be difficult as often you can not see them or easily know they are there…

For most people the only way to disable such RFids is by use of a microwave oven that burnt out the RFid electronics before the item it is in is damaged (leather goods are extremely problematical in this respect).

The thing is increasing numbers of things all tend to use less and less types of “Radio Interface”. RFids tend to use just a couple of radio frequencies, Bluetooth just one small band of frequencies and so on. Thus “to save cost” these standard radio frequencies and data protocols are used, which in turn means their usage increases and so the price drops further. And you get a downward spiral to just one or two standards. It’s probably safe to assume that anything that has a unique or semi-unique identifier will be used by someone looking to make rather more than “toll money”.

This makes the job of surveilling people vastly less difficult and also inexpensive, and at some point a threshold is crossed where this surveilling is not just increasingly profitable but increasingly ubiquitous.

As I used to say about the increasing ubiquity of such “tags”,

“Welcome to life in the goldfish bowl.”

Aaron • June 11, 2026 3:39 PM

Just remember, the higher tech the solution; the higher the maintenance and repair costs 😉

Robin • June 11, 2026 4:46 PM

@DBA
There are lots of features that I turn on – then off – only when I need them. I don’t like it but I use GPS when I need it then turn it off. Everything is off by default and on only when I need it. It’s a bit of a pain to remember to turn these options off but after a while it becomes a normal habit. I recommend it.

Clive Robinson • June 11, 2026 7:06 PM

@ Tim H,

With regards,

“Another reason to turn off BT and wifi on a phone when leaving the house.”

@ Robin

And,

“There are lots of features that I turn on – then off – only when I need them. I don’t like it but I use GPS when I need it then turn it off.”

You both should ask the $64,000 question,

“How do I know they are off?”

Because it’s safe to assume the software is probably lying to us.”

Both Apple and Google don’t turn the radio interfaces off these days.

It started around C19 and is “baked-in at the lowest layers of the OS” for “contract tracing and the like”.

The only way you can be “reasonably sure” is by

“Pulling the battery”

But that is not an option for many Smart Phones etc these days.

Dave • June 11, 2026 8:57 PM

@TimH: There are a ton of apps, at least for Android, that turn WiFi off based on your location, so you can have it on at home and work, off at all other times. Not sure if there’s the same for BT since I have it off at all times but I assume you can get ones for BT as well.

kiwano • June 11, 2026 9:31 PM

@Not really anonymous

As someone who primarily gets around by active transportation (e.g. walking and biking) I both continue to value the operators of motor vehicles having mechanisms of accountability for damn near running me over, and feel like I’m in a bit of a good position to suggest that there are ways of getting around without being tracked by your license plate, which require no changes to the policies maintaining these mechanisms of accountability.

Further, I’d like to point out that removing license plates makes these other modes of transportation riskier, while doing absolutely nothing about the surveillance nightmare that any reasonably recent model car has built into it (and which has been reported on, and those reports linked to by past posts in this blog)

lurker • June 11, 2026 10:35 PM

@Dave

So this app thet turns WiFi on and off knows your location.
How?
Who else is it telling?
(Rhetorical questions, no need to answer)

@ALL

Can somebody please quote Chapter and Verse for @Clive’s oft repeated claim that BLE (or equivalent) is ON by default in phones sold in the US.
Is this a legal requirement in the US?
EU?
And the rest of the world quietly sucks it up?

Greg • June 11, 2026 11:19 PM

Don’t all devices pretty much broadcast random mac addresses to avoid exactly this type of tracking?

- • June 12, 2026 3:27 AM

Greg :
Lurker:

MAC Randomisation is not secure

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.10600.pdf

MikeOh Shark • June 12, 2026 8:06 AM

The license plate readers are problematic and I have seen several new ones in my area.

I imagine that I would attract too much attention and annoy some callers I might want to hear from if I start carrying my phone in a metal bento box.

Without legal and liability changes this will continue.

Smidsy • June 12, 2026 9:21 AM

And yet people keep driving. Walking and cycling bypass a lot the surveillance state and surveillance bros, sometimes I think that’s why those modes are dispossessed of space, safety, downplayed and dehumanised. The machine wants your eyeballs. Getting outside your matrix capsule is more possible than it seems.

lurker • June 12, 2026 8:12 PM

@- •

Thanks for the paper, it makes me glad I gave Apple the finger some years ago.
But it seems always on BLE is a commercial decision by Apple, not a legal requirement of FCC et al?

io • June 12, 2026 11:44 PM

@ lurker,

But it seems always on BLE is a commercial decision by Apple, not a legal requirement of FCC et al?

Isn’t it the same with Samsung phones?

Clive Robinson • June 13, 2026 11:05 AM

@ lurker, -, io, ALL,

“But it seems always on BLE is a commercial decision by Apple, not a legal requirement of FCC et al?”

It all goes back to C19 and Apple and Google putting code in their Base OS’s for “contact tracing” which neither took out.

From what I also understand both Apple and Google “log Wifi” at the same time as it gives location way better indoors. That is not just precision in location but signal strength.

I’ve been told but not have duc into it, that this information is,

“Logged by the phone when OFF and uploaded when ON”.

Whilst I’ve no evidence “for” if the aim is “contact tracing” this makes sense.

Also such information being better that telco’s offer means it has rather more value.

It’s why long ago I stopped telling people to turn their phone off or use Faraday bags. Instead I advice putting it on the charger and leaving it there as it’s the phone they track as they can not directly track you.

Remember that,

“We Kill People Based on Metadata”

https://www.nybooks.com/online/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/

I’ve also often advised people not to use “secure messaging apps” because they are just one link in the chain and other links in the system make it futile security wise including E2EE.

As I indicated “client side scanning” was the new “golden key” for surveillance on people. Only there is absolutely no “NOBUS” about it. The NSO and similar software has the capability built right in.

It’s this “capability” that caused Jeff Bezos’s affair to be outed by the House of Saud, back in 2020,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos_phone_hacking_incident

But it hit’s closer to home. A company executive I advised thought they new better and is now sitting on a prison bed for what due to their age and general ill health will probably be the last years of their life.

And they are not the only one “not to listen”, consider all those who used those fake-secure phones set up by the FBI and various First World Guard Labour.

The latest “anti-burner” nonsense from the US FCC is absolutely nothing what so ever to do with the claims, it’s about ensuring surveillance and will cause considerable harm to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.

Like abused women trying to get reproductive health care, including to save their own lives,

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tennessee-death-penalty-abortion-b2925988.html

So “life in prison” or “death penalty”…

Enhanced License Plate Tracking

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